Thomas Messinger Drown (March 19, 1842–1904) was the fourth University President of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
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He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1842. He graduated high school in 1859. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1862. He went abroad to Germany to study chemistry in Freiberg, Saxony, and mining at the University of Heidelberg. From 1869 to 1870 he was an instructor of metallurgy at Harvard University. In 1872 he was doing research in his private laboratory back in his hometown of Philadelphia, where he would hire a former student as an assistant John Townsend Baker. From 1874 to 1881 he was the chair of Analytical Chemistry at Lafayette College. Baker followed him to Lafayette and later would found the J. T. Baker Chemical Co., which merged with Mallinckrodt and was absorbed and spun off of Tyco International as a component company of Covidien.
Drown then held a leadership post in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He helped start MIT’s chemical engineering curriculum in the late 1880s. In 1887, he was appointed by the newly-formed Massachusetts Board of Health to a landmark study of sanitary quality of the state's inland waters. As Consulting Chemist to the Massachusetts State Board of Health, he was in charge of the famous Lawrence Experiment Station laboratory conducting the water sampling, testing, and analysis. There he put to work the environmental chemist and first female graduate of MIT, Ellen Swallow Richards. This research created the famous "normal chlorine" map of Massachusetts that was the first of its kind and was the template for others. As a result, Massachusetts established the first water-quality standards in America, and the first modern sewage treatment plant was created. As a professor, Drown published a number of papers on metallurgy, mostly in Transactions of the American Institute of Engineers.
Dr. Drown was founder of the American Institute of Mining Engineers. He served as its secretary, and editor of its Transactions from 1871 till 1884. He was elected their president in 1897.
In 1895 he left MIT to become the fourth President of Lehigh University. Lehigh's endowment was predominantly in the stock of the major company of its founder, Asa Packer's Lehigh Valley Railroad. The Panic of 1893 crashed the market, brought the country into depression that lasted years, and nearly brought the university to financial insolvency. Many prominent railroads such as the Northern Pacific Railway, the Union Pacific Railroad and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad went into bankruptcy, and over 15,000 companies and 500 banks failed. In order to gain new sources of funding, President Drown broke the university's ties with the Episcopal Church in 1897, qualifying the university for aid from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. During his term, which started during a major financial crisis, he was able to save Lehigh from bankruptcy, grow enrollment, grow academics, and build. Williams Hall was completed. The curriculum leading to a degree in arts and engineering was established, as was the department of zoology and biology. New curricula were adopted in metallurgical engineering, geology, and physics. In 1904 Dr. Drown died, effectively ending his term.
In 1908, Lehigh University opened up Drown Hall which houses Lehigh's English Department.
| Preceded by Robert Alexander Lamberton |
President of Lehigh University 1895-1904 |
Succeeded by Henry Sturgis Drinker |